The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

by Martin Edwards

  The Beast Must Die

  by Nicholas Blake (1938)

  Fusing a psychological crime story with an investigation in the traditional style conducted by an erudite Great Detective is a challenge to test the skill of even the most accomplished author. Nicholas Blake, a young writer of distinction, pulled off the trick with such aplomb that this novel earned high critical praise, and has twice been made into a film.

  The book’s opening paragraph is as memorable as anything in the Francis Iles canon: ‘I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name, I don’t know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him.’ These are the words of Felix Lane, a successful detective novelist and widower whose young son has been knocked down by a car and killed. It was a hit-and-run calamity, and the police have proved unable to trace the guilty motorist. The grieving father determines to take the law into his own hands, and exact his own form of justice, or retribution.

  The first part of the novel takes the form of an extract from Felix Lane’s diary, and records the steps he takes to fulfil his goal; the second part, taking the story a stage further as Lane closes in on his quarry, is told in the third person. Nigel Strangeways, Blake’s series detective, is only introduced in the third of the four sections, after murder has occurred. The question he has to answer is whether Felix is guilty of the crime. In an epilogue, Strangeways describes the investigation as ‘my most unhappy case’.

  In a very different way, Blake was trying to do what Freeman Wills Crofts—in the same year—attempted with Antidote to Venom, namely to combine an ‘inverted’ story with a more conventional inquiry into a mysterious crime. Unlike Crofts, he was not seeking to tell a story with a hammered-home moral, or have his criminal indulge in a highly elaborate means of committing murder; these factors, coupled with his superior gift for characterisation, explain why Blake’s book seems the more realistic.

  Nicholas Blake was the nom de plume of Cecil Day-Lewis, whose primary reputation as a poet conceals the fact that he was a crime novelist of distinction. His debut novel, A Question of Proof (1935) was set in a private school, and introduced Strangeways, a wealthy private investigator. Thou Shell of Death (1936), a superb impossible-crime novel, swiftly followed. By early 1939, the Marxist detective-fiction fan John Strachey was citing Blake as one of the outstanding writers of detective fiction, in an article which seems the first to have proclaimed that the Thirties were a ‘Golden Age’ for the genre.

  After the Second World War, Blake continued to write crime novels of quality, and Strangeways adapted to changing times in books such as End of Chapter (1957), set in a publishing house. In 1968, the year when he was appointed Poet Laureate, he produced his final crime novel. Strangeways does not appear in The Private Wound, set in the author’s native Ireland and containing thinly disguised autobiographical elements, but some judges regard it as the best of the Nicholas Blake books.

  Background for Murder

  by Shelley Smith (1942)

  The title of Background for Murder implies a crime story with greater depth than the conventional whodunit, and Shelley Smith delivers on that promise. Her first book displays the energy of youth, as well as one or two of the hallmarks of inexperience. Smith uses the apparatus of the traditional detective story—a floor plan of the crime scene is supplied, and the sleuth writes out a list of suspects, with notes on motive, opportunity and likelihood of guilt. In the self-referential tradition of Golden Age mysteries, she makes frequent references to the genre: Holmes and Watson, Poirot’s ‘little grey cells’, Dorothy L. Sayers’ Unnatural Death (1927) and G.K. Chesterton are all name-checked.

  The story is, however, narrated by a private investigator, Jacob Chaos, in a wisecracking style influenced by the more ‘realistic’ American school of writers such as Raymond Chandler—and mental illness, abortion and sexual promiscuity are discussed more freely than in typical Golden Age mysteries. The result is a book reflecting a genre in transition, yet entertaining in its own right.

  Chaos has been called in by Scotland Yard to investigate a murder which has baffled the local police. Dr Maurice Royd, in charge of a hospital for the mentally ill, has been battered to death in his office with a poker. Improbably, the Yard have passed the case to Chaos because they want to hush up any possibility of scandal, and he soon establishes that Royd was an odious character whom many people, including his attractive and pregnant wife, had cause to wish dead. Chaos’ list of potential culprits runs to fifteen names, most of whom are either doctors or patients. He whittles down the options, but two more deaths occur before he reveals the truth in a scene which, although set in a doctor’s consulting room, is entirely in keeping with Poirot’s method of disclosing whodunit in a library crowded with suspects.

  In one passage, Smith breaks the fourth wall, as Chaos addresses the reader directly: ‘(The hell, you say, what’s this man Chaos up to? Do we need this subtle exposition of his reaction to atmosphere? Let us…return to our dead bodies—or else, hand me my copy of Mrs Christie’s latest. All right.)’ For Smith, atmosphere is important. The uncertain boundaries between sanity and insanity supply a central theme of the novel, reinforced by the setting. Three-quarters of a century after the book’s publication, the presentation of mental illness seems outdated, despite Smith’s progressive views, but like so many classic crime novels, the book supplies a fascinating insight into the attitudes of its time.

  Smith was a confident and accomplished writer, but little has been written about her personal life. Her real name was Nancy Hermione Courlander, and her sister Barbara also dabbled in crime fiction under the name Elizabeth Anthony. Smith was educated in France, and in her twenties she married and then divorced Stephen Bodington, a Marxist economist who later turned to writing about computers and socialism. Her second book, Death Stalks a Lady (1945), was a ‘woman in jeopardy’ mystery worthy of Ethel Lina White, and although Chaos—having made a transition to Scotland Yard—returned to solve a seemingly impossible crime in He Died of Murder! (1947), she promptly abandoned him.

  Smith and her contemporary Margot Bennett were leading exponents of the post-war British crime novel. An Afternoon to Kill (1953) boasts a stunning climax, while The Lord Have Mercy (1956) is a powerful update of the village mystery. After publishing The Ballad of the Running Man (1961), which was filmed, Smith produced only two more crime novels, but her work bridges that of the ‘Crime Queens’ of the Golden Age and high-calibre novels of the leading women writers of the next generation, notably P.D. James and Ruth Rendell.

  The Killer and the Slain

  by Hugh Walpole (1942)

  ‘A strange story’ is the apt subtitle of Hugh Walpole’s macabre, posthumously published novel. It was the fifth of his books to be flavoured by the fantastic, and in introducing a collection of the first four, he wrote: ‘It is not just now the fashion to believe in Good and Evil; at any rate no one pays them the compliment of decorating them with capital letters…It is a matter of reconciling two opposite worlds, a feat possibly too difficult for me, but one well worth attempting.’ His final attempt was the most gripping of all.

  The narrator, James Ozias Talbot, describes how his early years were haunted by a fellow pupil at school who shared his initials but whose personality was corrupt and malign, the polar opposite to his own. James Oliphant Tunstall is selfish and immoral, and although he sets himself up as Talbot’s protector, in reality he is a controlling bully who has spotted Talbot’s vulnerability, and is determined to have sport with him. Talbot comes to loathe him, and reprieve only comes when Tunstall moves away.

  In adulthood, Talbot marries the beautiful but chilly Eve, who runs their antique shop so that Talbot can pursue his career as a novelist in the seaside town where they live. Tunstall, now a successful painter, re-enters his life, and soon proceeds to re-establish his dominance, not least by seducing Eve. Talbot is driven to murderous revenge, but in a nig
htmarish twist on the Jekyll-and-Hyde scenario, he finds himself taking on Tunstall’s characteristics.

  The Killer and the Slain is a compelling novel, very distantly reminiscent of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), yet distinctive in its treatment of cruelty and murderous obsession. Walpole conceived the storyline years before the start of the Second World War, but by the time he came to start writing, Britain was under attack from the air. The nightmarish atmosphere created by the threat from a ruthless oppressor translates into a book of genuine power.

  Hugh Walpole was a highly regarded novelist whose reputation began to fade during his lifetime, and has never fully recovered. The four books in The Herries Chronicles, his series of historical romances set in the Lake District, were especially popular. For a time he worked in Hollywood, where he wrote the screenplay for David O. Selznick’s film of David Copperfield, and he was knighted in 1937. On the strength of his occasional ‘shockers’, he was invited to become a founder member of the Detection Club, and he was a contributor to their first round-robin mystery, Behind the Screen (1930). Julian Symons chose Above the Dark Circus (1931) as one of his ‘hundred best crime stories’, saying it was Walpole’s ‘feeling for fear and cruelty that gives a curious distinction’ to the book. Even darker emotions swirl through The Killer and the Slain, a book whose admirers included Jorge Luis Borges, yet which remains unaccountably neglected.

  The 31st of February

  by Julian Symons (1950)

  Julian Symons worked as a copywriter after leaving the army, an experience which provided him with the background for his second novel, A Man Called Jones (1947). His fourth novel, which appeared three years later, was set in Vincent’s Advertising Agency, but the similarities ended there. Symons came to have little or no regard for his first three whodunits, but The 31st of February marked a new beginning for him, and signposted the way ahead for post-war crime writers.

  In a personal memoir included in a posthumous bibliography of his vast body of work, Symons said: ‘I must at that time have had some nascent idea about doing all the things in a crime story that one can do in a “straight” novel, in the way of character development and saying something about the form and shape of society…There is a puzzle to be solved—did copywriter Anderson kill his wife or did she just fall down the cellar stairs?—but this goes along with a vision of the nightmare world Anderson inhabits and the mechanical nature of his reactions to the events that eventually overwhelm him.’

  For the light-heartedness of Bland Beginning (1949), his third novel, Symons substituted a study of a man whose self-belief disintegrates under pressure. Much of that pressure is applied by Inspector Cresse, whose portrayal reflects Symons’ interest in the story of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Towards the end of the novel, when he is accused of ‘playing God’ with Anderson, Cresse mounts a robust defence of his methods: ‘A policeman is God—or he is God’s earthly substitute. Justice should be intelligent, not blind. If we are obstructing by the forms of legality in reaching the ends of justice, the forms of legality must be ignored.’ In one way or another, many of the Great Detectives held similar views. But the final lines of this thought-provoking story suggest that such an assumption of power can corrupt.

  The novel was much praised (despite earning the disfavour of traditionalist critics such as Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor), and although some of Symons’ writing at this stage of his career was heavy-handed, his fiction demonstrated growing confidence and skill.

  Julian Gustave Symons wrote poetry, history, biography and literary studies of distinction, but is remembered chiefly for his contribution to crime fiction. In 1976 he succeeded Agatha Christie as President of the Detection Club, and more than four decades after its first edition appeared in 1972, his history of the genre Bloody Murder remains admired and influential, even if the development of the detective story into the crime novel has proved less clear and straightforward than Symons suggests.

  One regrettable consequence of Bloody Murder’s success is that it has overshadowed Symons’ achievements as a novelist. He combined the study of criminal psychology and the examination of social mores with dazzling plots in books such as The Man Who Killed Himself (1967), The Man Whose Dreams Came True (1968) and The Plot against Roger Rider (1973), while The Name of Annabel Lee (1983) reflects his enthusiasm for Edgar Allan Poe, whose biography he wrote. A particularly innovative and successful late novel, Death’s Darkest Face (1990), has been mysteriously overlooked by commentators. Patricia Highsmith reciprocated Symons’ admiration for her work, and said that he was ‘a first class writer…his suspense novels illustrate the scope possible to this genre’. For a crime novelist, this is an epitaph to die for.

  Select Bibliography

  The primary sources for The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books are the novels of the writers discussed, but a vast literature deals with the topics covered. For those seeking to research further, this highly selective list of books, many of which I have referred to in researching the story of classic crime, should provide a good starting point.

  Adey, Robert, Locked Room Murders (London, Ferret Fantasy: 1979, rev. ed. 1991)

  Bargainnier, Earl. F. ed., Twelve Englishmen of Mystery (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1984)

  Barnes, Melvyn, Murder in Print: A Guide to Two Centuries of Crime Fiction (London, Barn Owl Books, 1986)

  Barnes, Melvyn, Francis Durbridge: A Centenary Appreciation (Stowmarket: Netherall Books, 2015)

  Barzun, Jacques and Taylor, Wendell Hertig, A Catalogue of Crime (New York: Harper & Row, 1971, rev. ed. 1989)

  Barzun, Jacques and Taylor, Wendell Hertig, A Book of Prefaces to Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction 1900–1950 (New York: Garland, 1978)

  Binyon, T.J., Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction (Oxford, O.U.P., 1989)

  Clark, Neil, Stranger than Fiction: The Life of Edgar Wallace, the Man who Created King Kong (Stroud: The History Press, 2014)

  Cooper, John and Pike, B.A., Detective Fiction: The Collector’s Guide (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988, rev.ed.1994)

  Craig, Patricia and Cadogan, Mary, The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction (London: Gollancz, 1981)

  Curran, John, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mystery in the Making (London: HarperCollins, 2009)

  Curran, John, Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Making: Stories and Secrets from Her Archive (London: HarperCollins, 2011)

  Dean, Christopher, ed., Encounters with Lord Peter (Hurstpierpoint: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 1991)

  Donaldson, Norman, In Search of Dr Thorndyke (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1971, rev. ed. 1998)

  Drayton, Joanne, Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime (Auckland: Collins, 2008)

  Edwards, Martin, The Golden Age of Murder (London: HarperCollins, 2015)

  Edwards, Martin, ed., Taking Detective Stories Seriously: The Detective Fiction Reviews of Dorothy L. Sayers (Witham: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 2017)

  Evans, Curtis, Masters of the ‘Humdrum’ Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1921–1961 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2012)

  Evans, Curtis, ed., Mysteries Unlocked: Essays in Honor of Douglas G. Greene (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2014)

  Gilbert, Michael, ed. Crime in Good Company: essays on criminals and crime writing (London, Constable, 1959)

  Girvan, Waveney, ed., Eden Phillpotts, an Assessment and Tribute (London: Hutchinson, 1953)

  Greene, Douglas G., John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles (New York: Otto Penzler, 1995)

  Haste, Steve, Criminal Sentences: True Crime in Fiction and Drama (London: Cygnus Arts, 1997)

  Haycraft, Howard, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (New York: D. Appleton-Century Com
pany, 1941)

  Haycraft, Howard, ed., The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946)

  Herbert, Rosemary, ed., The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)

  Hubin, Allen J., Crime Fiction 1749–1980: A Comprehensive Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1984)

  James, P.D., Talking About Detective Fiction (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2009)

  Jones, Julia, The Adventures of Margery Allingham (Pleshey: Golden Duck, 2009)

  Keating, H.R.F., Murder Must Appetize (London: Lemon Tree, 1975)

  Keating, H.R.F., Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books (London: Xanadu, 1987)

  Kestner, Joseph A., The Edwardian Detective, 1901–1915 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000)

  Lewis, Margaret, Ngaio Marsh: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1991)

  Light, Alison, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991)

  Lobdell, Jared, The Detective Fiction Reviews of Charles Williams, 1930–1935 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2003)

  Mann, Jessica, Deadlier than the Male (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1981)

  Meredith, Anne, Three-a-Penny (London: Faber, 1940)

  Murch, A.E., The Development of the Detective Novel (London, Peter Owen, 1958)

  Osborne, Charles, The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie (London, Collins, 1982)

  Panek, Leroy, Watteau’s Shepherds: the Detective Novel in Britain, 1914–1940 (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1979)

  Pedersen, Jay P., ed., The St James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers (Chicago: St James Press, 1991)